Яндекс

Friday, May 15, 2015

Users asked me what I'm planing to do when I finish with Android port.
Usually I answer as: I will continue to work on the project as on my favorite hobby. However, since I usually have no time for hobbies, active development will be impossible.

Android port goes well. However, it still needs circa two weeks for completion. Thus, I decided to make another attempt to collect funds for further development and today I started new campaign on Indiegogo - GLideN64-FX. The campaign is dedicated to porting of DolphinFX post-processing suite to GLideN64. It is primary task, which I estimated as one month works. I'm not sure that campaign will reach the goal. However, the project has plenty of tasks to do beside it. If campaign goal will not be reached, collected funds will be spend to fixing most serious problems open in bug tracker. If the campaign will be super-successful and rise more funds than necessary to implement the campaign task, the rest of funds also will be spend to project development.

Result of the first two weeks of the campaign will show me what to do next: prepare to the next challenging task or update my resume.

Update: It seems that the campaign does not attract much interest. 20% collected for 10 days. My thanks to 11 people who already backed the project. However, it's not enough. 50% until June would be a signal for me to start works on that task. 20% is the signal to use plan B.

Update 2: 30 % at the moment. Not bad, but still not enough.

Update 3: 41 % at the moment. Almost there. I need few days to fix remaining issues with Android port. Hopefully, that time will be enough to reach 50+%.

Friday, May 8, 2015

Active testing of the first Public Release revealed many new issues in plugin's work. Since I'm busy with Android porting, I can't spend my time on issues with emulation. However, several found issues related to general work of the plugin. Few scenarios of plugin's crash during emulation reported too. So, I took a break in Android development and corrected most nasty bugs:

Fixed Texture pack path not saved correctly #456

Enabled translations for About dialog, #494

Fixed anisotropic filtering, #505

Fixed Anti-aliasing compatibility with frame buffer emulation, #244

Fixed crash in Glover, #474

Fixed crash in Snowboard Kids, #477

Fixed texture issue in Banjo Tooie, #499

Fixed text corruption in Mupen64Plus

New sources included into distributive along with binaries for Windows and Ubuntu. Download from GitHub. The current version of sources are compatible with GL ES 3 and GL ES 3.1. Porting to GL ES 2.0 will start soon. GL ES 3.1 version has almost all features of PC build, except for texture library support. Below is screen shot from development alpha of Mepen64Plus AE integrated with GLideN64 running on NVidia Shield tablet with frame buffer emulation of.

Friday, May 1, 2015

Two weeks passed since the “Early Release” and time for the first Public Release is come. Since the “Early Release” leaked week ago “in accordance with GPL rules”, eager people already know what to expect from this release. Nevertheless, development works continued all these two weeks, and Public Release got some new features.

The main new GUI feature is internalization support. It implemented just few days ago, and currently the project has only three translations: Italian, French and German. Thanks to our forum members baptiste, ratop46, Predator82 and Mark L.R. for these translations. If you want to translate the project on your language, check this wiki page:https://github.com/gonetz/GLideN64/wiki/Internalization

Other changes are internal. Several bad regression bugs were found and fixed. We have done large work for improving stability of frame buffer emulation. Probability of game crash during emulation is greatly reduced. Project ini file with custom game settings cleaned and updated. Fixed problems with bloom post-filter.

Time to sum up the results. This project started as my little private hobby, but thanks to very successful crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogowe pushed it on very high new level. It is stable, compatible, fairly fast graphics plugin with unique features which you cannot find in any other N64 graphics plugin with hardware rendering. It supports all popular N64 emulators for Windows and it works well on Linux. All campaign goals successfully achieved. Moreover, the project got features, which initially considered as “may be somewhere in a far future”. Low Level Emulation and Widescreen support are among them.

There is the price for that. The project planned release date was January. Due to huge amount of works, the release delayed for four month. I expected that the project might take more time than planned when I prepared the Indiegogo campaign, but I did not expect that it would be twice as much. The planned Android port works will be finished, but I have no funds left for anything else.

I want to express my sincere gratitude to all people who helped me with that project. First of all, our main beta tester Olivieryuyu, who made that campaign possible and helped the project in variety of ways. All people, who donated to the project and make it real. Special thanks to most active forum members, who supported me and greatly helped me with testing: nesplayer4life , theboy181, Predator82, ratop46, aquatakat, baptiste, Mush Man, v1del.

Now I am switching to Android port. I already started that work. I am working with Mupen64Plus AE team.I am ready to contact with other projects dedicated to N64 emulation on mobile devices.